John Tierney Shovels Bunk

I don't usually comment on the right-wing hacks the NY Times has among its columnists, but when anyone pooh-poohs the risks of global warming, I feel compelled to step in.  Today, right-wing hack John Tierney [behind subscription wall], in a piece titled "The Kids are All Right" decided to pick up the administration story line on global warming and push the peanut down the road a bit.

In this piece, he likens the cries of alarm over global warming to the cries of alarm in the late sixties (when the U.S. population topped 200 million) over the population explosion.  Then, he reports, everyone was worried that food supplies would run out.  Now, he points out, that as the population is about to top 300 million, there is no fear of starving to death due to lack of food.  In fact, the fear is that too many people are obese.  So, he concludes, alarmists should not be listened to.  The world will always right itself.  The same, he says, will be true of global warming.  Here's his concluding paragraph:

In the long debate about overpopulation and famine, none of the gloomy projections by intellectuals proved to be as prescient as an old proverb in farming societies: “Each extra mouth comes attached to two extra hands.” No matter what problems lie ahead, the good news on Tuesday will be that America has 600 million hands to solve them.

I found this piece both laughable and absurd.  In the first place, it's my recollection that the cries of alarm and the push for "fertility targets" and "optimal population sizes" back in the late sixties were coming mostly from Republicans who were worried not so much about food supplies (then, as now, the Republicans were pretty well fed) as about the exploding population of blacks and hispanics -- and, on a worldwide basis, about being overrun by the poor, dark-skinned people from third world countries. 

Second, and more important, it is true that the question of population and food supply has long been a cause for alarm.  Go back, for example, to the nineteenth century economist Thomas Malthus, who worried that in the natural course of things, the population would grow to the point where the earth's capacity to produce food would  just barely sustain  it.  At that point Malthus feared that people were doomed to a subsistence life style.

Malthus, of course, proved to be wrong (or at least very premature).  The earth's capacity to produce food expanded enormously as fertilizers, improved farming techniques, and mechanized harvesting became available.  But, the key question here is why those improvements were developed.  The answer is because there was a market for them.  People needed food.  As food began to run low, prices rose.  Farmers with better techniques would profit from them.  Hence, farmers would pay for new technologies.  Inventors would have incentives to develop those new technologies.  The market worked because there was a market.

Now, let's move to global warming.  At the moment, there is no market for technologies that reduce or prevent global warming.  Hence, there is no incentive for industries (or individuals) that spew out greenhouse gases to invest in technologies that reduce them.  Hence, there is no incentive for inventors to develop those technologies.  The problem here, unlike farming, is that the only gain comes from collective action.  One person (or company) who reduces his (its) emissions gains next to nothing from it.  The only gain comes when all make efforts to reduce their emissions, and the only way to achieve that is to create a regulatory environment that encourages a collective effort.

The problem is quite similar to what happened to the fishing grounds off of Nova Scotia.  The fish populations were being fished out.  No individual fisherman would gain by deliberately limiting his own catch.  The only way the fish population could be restored was for government to force all fishermen to limit their catches through laws, regulations, and economic incentives.

I have no doubt that, with the proper regulatory environment, human ingenuity could solve (or at least could have solved-- it may now be too late) the global warming problem.  But, without market incentives to encourage this, it's not going to happen.

That is why Tierney's analysis is pure bunk.